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Comment by _zagj

For those unaware, Casey Muratori started a project called Handmade Hero in 2014 to build a complete game from scratch while livestreaming the entire process, with the goal of showing people not just how, but why, rolling your own engine (hence the "handmade" part) is better than relying on Unity, Unreal, or some other leaky abstraction. He even solicited pre-orders for the finished product, IIRC.

Ten years later, he has no game, only a rudimentary, tile-based dungeon-crawler engine, and reams of code he's written and re-written (as API sands shifted beneath his feet), and the project seems to be permanently on hiatus now. Thus, Casey inadvertently proved himself wrong, and the conventional wisdom (use an existing engine) correct.

As far as OOP goes, 45 years has shown that it makes developers highly productive, and ultimately, as the saying goes, "real heroes (handmade or otherwise) ship." Casey's company was founded 20 years ago, and he's never shipped a software product.

He complains often about software getting slower, which I agree with. Yet how many mainstays of Windows 95/98 desktop software were written in a significantly OO style using C++ with MFC?

parent _zagj 1 year ago

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